Fruits Too Are Killers
By Vinod Varshney
Doctors advise to have five servings of fruits every day. With the prevalence of ripening of fruits, especially mangoes, papayas and bananas by Calcium Carbide, it seems a dangerous proposition. Looks like it is not just Dow Chemical which killed and made sick thousands of people in Bhopal, our own fruit-dealers are busy doing that by inducing cancers among people. There are no statistics on how many Indians get cancer because of just fruits ripening with Calcium Carbide. I am perplexed why the Government could think of out-lawing it through PFA Act so late.
Bigger question will remain how to enforce this new stipulation. Who will see that fruits are not ripened the wrong way? There should be some NGO with the help of Govt coming forward for mass awareness among this illiterate section of the society, the fruit-dealers.
Here English will not work. Only Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Oriya etc would do better. There should be TV ads in Indian languages advising against using Calcium Carbide.
To me, even more shocking is the revelation that safer Ethylene is not easily available to most fruit dealers. End result of the situation is-- I am unhappy as I was enjoying this season my mangoes daily, at least twice a day, now onwards I shall look at them with suspicion—Mangoes thou too!!!
This is indeed a bad news. This has become so difficult to choose what to eat. In fact our society is so illiterate that any useful scientific information is of not much use to them. And law enforcement? Everybody knows about it. Least said the best.
ReplyDeleteYour article is not convincing though it gives a lot of information.
ReplyDeleteYour article gives useful information but still I can't leave mangoes without eating.What should we eat I can not even think--Apples become greenafter oxidation,they should be brown in colour.
ReplyDelete